It is possible that the white background file is a jpg. That would have grey pixels around the edges which would enlarge the engrave.
Saving as transparent requires a PNG, which would eliminate that.
No clue if that’s what’s happening here, just a hypothesis.
That’s certainly possible. JPEG doesnt really do solid areas, so a few stray off-white pixels would be likely in that case.
That’s what I understood as well and I was confused by Chris comment that the white was ignored. I get that white areas will not be marked by the laser, but they are processed and add to the time the entire takes. (Hope that makes sense, it’s been a very long day lol.)
OK, good to know I’m not the only one who does this. This is like one of those moments when you think your going to a cool costume party and when you show up it’s more like this… lol
Doing work on some large engraves for a project for my wife, and what appeared to be a white background certainly caused extra engrave time as well as some very slight burn-in on the PG white acrylic. What I have ended up doing is digging up Microsoft Photo Editor from one of the earlier versions of Microsoft Office (I think from 2003 or earlier). file is PhotoEd.exe (and a few ancillary files). There is a great function in the program “Set Transparent Color” which makes it VERY EASY to auto-magically set every color in a picture to transparent - and lets you easily vary the color tolerance from 1 - 3 - 5 and 10%, I believe. This is helping to produce an outstanding engrave of a magnolia for a plate charger (well, a set of 8 actually) for my wife… and shrinking the engrave time from roughly 2+ hours to 45 minutes actually makes it a doable project. (especially when you have to multiply the engrave time by 8 - for the eight chargers in the set.)
Yes, you’ll definitely want to make sure that your background is 255, 255, 255 (white) or transparent. Anything other than 255 will cause the laser to fire.
And great tip on the Microsoft photo editor!
